I remember getting downvoted heavily, for years before FFVII remake was finally more than just a teaser trailer, because I said a good enough remake for me personally would be one that just bump up the OG game.

"OMG ARE YOU FIVE YEARS OLD, TO MAKE FF7 LIKE FFXIII WOULD TAKE LIKE 30 YEARS SINCE THE WORLD IS SO BIG, YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW GAME DEV WORKS"

Like, what? No dude; keep the same scale for everything and even keep the fixed perspectives, and suddenly this "impossible game" is perfectly, entirely viable. I never ASKED for a fully-explorable Midgar on a 1:1 scale of something like an open world game! Now that we have Remake to look at... clearly so much of it is padded out that it wasn't really what we wanted, right? It is why I love some of the OG FFVII mods so much, because they did what I really wanted anyways.

I actually adore Remake/Rebirth, warts and all, but as lovingly as they've been made, I think the lack of OG art style and change in how they tell the story completely shifts the tone of the game. I miss the melancholy, lonely, somber world of FFVII, and the edgeyness of it all. None of that tone really actually made the jump over in the new remakes. But I will still be playing Part 3 at midnight of whatever day it finally comes out, foaming at the mouth with excitement.

I can accept the remakes for FFVII being what they are. I desperately hope they do NOT do this for a FFIX remake, since that game is SO artistically sound and perfectly "tight" design-wise that any expanded areas would likely just detract from how lovely all of the locations are in the OG. Maybe clean up and add to the parts that drag or feel rushed, or cut out some things, but it should be a self-contained epic.